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I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Corrie Frasier, Senior Communications Officer, Innovation, at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation about their partnership with the Cannes International Festival of Creativity. Called Cannes Chimera, this challenge invites you to share your best ideas on the world stage and receive the creative and financial support to make them a reality. In the following interview, Corrie Frasier explains the inspiration, process and hopes for the challenge.

Corrie Frasier: The issues we work on are really tough, really complex. We had been exploring using our Grand Challenges Explorations program to reach out to the global creative community to help us push our thinking. At the same time the Cannes Festival was looking to unleash this extraordinary group of Grand Prix winners on a challenge that could really move the needle on an important social issue. We realized, that by working together, we could bring an entirely new community into this work with us, and provide an outlet for creatives to make real impact in the world.

Simon Mainwaring: There are two important and arguably fresh dynamics at work here. One is the for-profit and non-profit partnership, and the second is the collaborative nature of Cannes Chimera where you see otherwise competitive ad agencies and PR firms working together on a social cause. Is this a new dynamic we’re seeing?

Corrie Frasier: Yes, I do think that it’s new. At the foundation overall we have come to believe very strongly that the partnership between the private sector, the government sector, and the nonprofit sector is absolutely critical. And if you look across our program teams, you will see that kind of collaboration in a lot of the work that we do. It was a really natural next step for us to start looking at that kind of collaboration in communications.

The collaboration piece is also really exciting. I take a cue from some of the great programs that have already been put in place. Look at Nike’s GreenXchange program, or at something like Kickstarter where you have people collaborating on a transactional basis. I think that the time has come where we have the underlying technology and capability to bring people around the world together to focus on some really critical issues. The thing that I think needs to keep evolving is the ethos of the organizations who may be able to come to play in this space. It’s not necessarily a comfortable space for organizations that operate in a competitive environment. But I think that there’s huge opportunity for all companies going forward.

Simon Mainwaring: Why did you settle on the challenge of communicating how foreign aid makes a difference?

Corrie Frasier: We’re in an incredibly challenging economic time globally right now. Everything is on the table as governments look at how they are spending their money.

Aid is such a tiny portion of the overall budget of most of the governments, less than one percent. But there is this perception that it’s a significantly greater investment, and that aid investments are not showing the kind of returns they need to make it worthwhile going forward. But the dividends we see from foreign aid are extraordinary. Those stories are the ones that we need to get out there.

It is such a tough problem and so deeply entrenched in public perceptions that we felt that this one, more than anything that we could take a look at, would really benefit from the kind of innovation that we’re hoping applicants will bring to bear on the problem.

Simon Mainwaring: Exactly what sort of organizations or people are you hoping to get proposals from? Should their proposals be focused on the legitimacy of foreign aid outright or on more effective ways of sharing those stories to shift the perception of foreign aid?